Musings on the glamorous life of a historical and contemporary romance author.

Saturday, April 2, 2016

Saturday fun time!

Friday was our fun, busy outside-the-house time.

Today is my stay at home and recover time. Which is fun and quiet. I have my oldest teen up, my middle child and husband still in bed, and my daughter off to a Girl Scout thing. The cats are fed and taking a nap. All that eating wears them out. Later, I'll go to the library. Big plans.

I felt much better after my Lurgy day on Thursday, so was the one who took two of my kids to San Francisco. The eight-year-old girl and the thirteen-year-old boy. One of the boy's homeschool-not-at-home class teachers set up a field trip, so the Exploratorium was affordable, which it usually is not. Not that you shouldn't go there if you at all like science and especially if you have kids, but it's expensive and a full-day commitment to noise and constantly being around people.

But the exhibits are AWESOME. It is an amazing hands-on science museum with all kinds of things to explore and do. It ranks as one of the best science museums in the country and definitely way up there with places like COSI in Columbus and Science and Industry in Chicago (that place has hands-on stuff, right?). Plus the setting down at the SF Bay piers can't be beat, especially on a sunny, warmish day like yesterday.

Someday, we will even go when it isn't a madhouse. When I am very rich and can rent the museum just for us and a hundred friends. And can afford to have my private yacht drop me off right at the pier to take me to my helipad and fly me home. Yeah.

View from the biology area at the bay end of the museum. The Bay Bridge is to the right and the island is Yerba Buena, known best as the tunnel in the middle of the Bay Bridge.

Daughter doing her goofy-face over-enthusiastic thing. The exhibit had a prism and a light sensor that could pick up infra-red, which spiked on the computer screen.

Son at lunch acting goofy. Yes, I have trouble getting non-goofy pictures of my kids.

Picture of...nothing. The walls are glow in the dark and a huge flashbulb goes off every 45 seconds, leaving shadow pictures on the wall. But taking a picture of the shadows in extremely low-light conditions (between flashes) is something my phone camera cannot handle, so I had to use my flash... It was way fun, especially when it wasn't too crowded. We were in there for a good quarter hour.

We left at three, trying to beat the San Francisco rush hour. It took 40 minutes to go 1.3 miles to even get on the Bay Bridge. 3 lanes of traffic had to funnel into 2 and to be joined by cars from all sides and then we had to funnel into 1 lane and then merge with another line of cars and then finally get into the left lane of traffic on Hwy 80. Holy cow. The light would go green and ONE car would get through for each lane. Then cars (mostly expensive cars...) would come speeding up the disappearing lane and want to merge. And I was doing breathing exercises and trying to not get ragey. Then there were several slow-downs on the way back up to the Sacramento area. We stopped for dinner halfway home to breathe and because the teen boy was hungry.

We should have stayed with our friends who were there for a couple more hours in the museum, then got dinner on the piers, then drove home after rush hour. But that would have meant four more hours of people and crowds and aching feet and we were already beat.

My kids and I played Twenty Questions and the alphabet game and another game where we had to think of things with the same first letter as our name to take on a boat.

Then I taught them the game "I'm going on a trip and I'm going to take an Apple" in which you have to remember all the other things (alphabetically) that everyone is taking and recite them before adding the thing for the next letter. "An apple, a beet, a clown, a dog, an Eskimo (with a disclaimer of how that's not the correct name for the First Nations people in the Arctic areas of Canada, Alaska, and Russia), a fish, a giraffe...." It's pretty hard, even with the alphabet mnemonic.

So really, it was a no-writing-at-all day, but a nice diversion.

And a reminder of why I don't live in a city. Though I guess if we lived INSIDE SF, we wouldn't have to deal with rush hour. Of course, we'd have all 5 of us in a one-room hovel, at those prices.